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Saturday, 3 October 2009

Dancing in the moonlight

Strictly's Jo Wood - more of her later.

After throwing my toys out the pram and threatening to give up blogging altogether, inspiration comes along in the shape of supper at Ted Moult's and Jamie Lee's. This involves a tour of their monster motor home, the best Beef Wellington I have ever tasted and Posh Totty peeling off her jeans to show Mr Grigg a bruise on her thigh caused by an excited horse.

During the course of the evening, I am dazzled by headlights as a car I assume to be driven by Ted and Jamie Lee's occasional neighbour Mr St John goes up and down the drive trying to throw light on the identity of the dinner guests.

By the time we leave, Ted's shirt is up over his chest, showing off his toned torso after losing four stone following a health scare, Jamie Lee, like her A Fish Called Wanda namesake, is weak at the knees by the way Mr Grigg says Deportivo La Coruna and Camilla generously gives me her necklace after I remark for the third time how pretty it is.

'No, honestly,' I say. 'I didn't mean you had to give it to me.'

'Oh take it,' she says irritably, 'I don't really like it. I'd much rather you had it.'

Sadly, it is made of buttons rather than pearls. I like it so much I wear it in bed.

Then on our way back, we slip into Mrs Bancroft's, who seems to be entertaining the rest of the village to drinks and nibbles. While we are there I get into a conversation with the aunt of Jo Wood, the former wife of Rolling Stones rocker Ronnie, who is currently battling it out in the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing programme tonight. This is not a programme I watch but the village is hooked because Jo's aunt is one of our gang, a leading member of the local WI but of the Helen Mirren variety rather than Miss Marple.

Jo is having a hard time of it, and may not make it through tonight's programme. Among her Strictly rivals are boxer Joe Calzaghe, Oxo mum Lynda Bellingham - whose convicted fraudster husband 'Mr Spain' used to run the local nightclub in my kind of town - and cricketer Phil Tuffnell.

'I want everyone to root for her,' says Jo's aunt.

As we leave Mrs Bancroft's in the early hours, Mr Grigg and I waltz across the village square in the moonlight.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was a child in a meadow with a woodland circle of beech trees around me. And there was clover growing i...

The World from My Window

Stories from Corfu and Dorset

'Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder - the discovery of yourself.'

So said Lawrence Durrell in the book, Prospero's Cell. In October 2012, I exchanged my life in the Dorset village of Lush Places, in the heart of England's rural underbelly, for twelve months in a village in north Corfu which I call Agios Magikades.

But a year was not enough. And now, in fits and starts, I'm back, with a foot in both countries.

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